Plasmids are important in biotechnology because they are?

Plasmids are a vehicle for insertion of foreign genes for many types of cells including e. coli, yeast, or any mammalian cells. An important aspect of plasmids is that by using restriction enzymes you can clone the gene of interest into a variety of expression vectors. This allows you to alter the promoter, the antibiotic resistance, or add a tag to your expressed protein.